Camera as Weapon: Worker Photography Between the Wars

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Photography entered a new age of creation in the mid-1920s with the advent of small,hand-held cameras, such as the Leica and Ermanox, capable of functioning with available light rather than flash. These cameras facilitated a new, more candid documentation of the world, while faster, more efficient rotary printing methods made this vision widely available to the German public through a proliferation of new, photographically illustrated magazines. The era of photojournalism had begun.

Photography, perhaps more than any other medium, mirrored the Weimar Republic's shifting political ground and multiple personalities. Erich Salomon's work documented in the most candid terms to date the face of an unyielding aristocratic government, while Bauhaus photographers spit in the eye of the status quo with their vertiginous, daring perspectives. On the cool, sober side, Albert Renger-Patzch and Karl Blossfeldt cataloged the surface of Weimar Germany in the crisp style of Neue Sachlichkeit , and August Sander applied the same dispassionate gaze to the republic's citizens.

These facets of photographic history have come to define the fertile culture of Weimar Germany, though none of them, not even Sander's documentation of the diversity of German society, directly addressed the continual crises that beset the era. The troubled face of Germany was not left unrecorded, however. That domain was claimed by photographers of the disaffected working class, men and women whose cameras became instruments of self-empowerment in a struggle for revolutionary change.